How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. Francis Wheen

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ nations and groups of different civilisations. The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.’

      Finally, having got everyone talking about your provocative new idea (Huntington’s article was translated into twenty-six languages), reap the rewards by expanding it into a bestselling book. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was duly published in 1996.

      There, however, any resemblance to Fukuyama ceased – or so it appeared. Huntington’s paradigm was generally taken as a rebuttal of Fukuyama’s Panglossian optimism. As well it might be, for Huntington was a perfect specimen of the gloomy realist, committed to maintaining the balance of power and profoundly mistrustful of utopian dreamers – or indeed anyone who thought or hoped that the human condition was susceptible to improvement. As he told an interviewer, ‘I am a child of Niehbur’ – Ronald Niehbur, a Protestant theologian who believed that order could be preserved only by severe restrictions designed to bridle humanity’s inherent wickedness.

      Huntington’s fellow-postgraduates at Harvard in 1950 included a chubby, precocious émigré called Henry Kissinger; a few years later, as a young don at the university’s School of Government, his closest colleague was Zbigniew Brzezinski, later a hawkish National Security Adviser to President Carter. Unlike his friends Kissinger and Brzezinski, Huntington remained in academe, seeking inspiration from tutorials and seminars rather than crisis meetings in the Oval Office (though he did advise Lyndon Johnson’s administration in 1967, and wrote a few speeches for Jimmy Carter a decade later). His modus operandi was set out in his first book, The Soldier and the State, in 1957. While admitting that ‘actual personalities, institutions and beliefs do not fit into neat logical categories’, he nevertheless insisted that ‘neat logical categories are necessary if a man is to think profitably about the real world in which he lives and to derive from it lessons for broader application and use’. Without abstraction, generalisation and simplification there could be no understanding. One reviewer complained that the text was ‘noisy with the sounds of sawing and stretching as the facts are forced into the bed that has been prepared for them’.

      This was the technique he exercised thirty-five years later (and rather profitably, to purloin his own adverb) when formulating the Clash of Civilisations theory. He divided the world into ‘seven or eight’ distinct civilisations – Western, Islamic, Hindu, Latin American, Slavic-Orthodox, Confucian, Japanese and ‘possibly’ African. The artificiality of this taxonomy became most apparent with his startling declaration that Greece ‘is not part of Western civilisation’; because it happened to have the wrong sort of Christianity, the birthplace of European culture was filed alongside Russia under ‘Orthodox’. Guessing that this might raise eyebrows, Huntington cited an extra reason for excluding Greeks from the Western bloc: for a few years in the 1960s and 1970s they were ruled by a military dictatorship. Yet Spain, which endured the dictatorship of General Franco at the same time, was welcomed into his club without any awkward questions from the membership secretary.

      The categorisation unmistakably reflected his own values and prejudices, as when he rebuked politicians in Australia for betraying the country’s Western heritage by seeking to ‘cultivate close ties with its [Asian] neighbours’. Mixed marriages between countries representing different cultures can never succeed, Huntington said, because ‘successful economic association needs a commonality of civilisation’. With characteristic perversity, however, he decided that incongruous alliances outside the Western world were entirely natural: hence, for example, his warning that an Islamic – Confucian coalition ‘has emerged to challenge Western interests, values and power’, as proved by the sale of Chinese weapons to Iran and Pakistan in the 1980s. The supply of Western arms to Saudi Arabia in that period, exemplified most conspicuously by the multi-billion-dollar Al-Yamamah contract, did not lead him to conclude that there is an equally ‘natural’ Christian-Islamic connection.

      As the argument proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that pedantic distinctions between, say, Japan and Thailand or Italy and Greece are a flimsy camouflage intended to disguise his even cruder overstatement: that the modern world can be defined as ‘the West vs the Rest’. Not that any camouflage was necessary. In a further article published by Foreign Affairs later in 1993, Huntington replied to those who had accused him of oversimplification with a defiant plea of guilty as charged: ‘When people think seriously, they think abstractly; they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, William James said, only “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion”.’

      True enough, up to a point: free thinkers should always keep Occam’s Razor within reach, to cut through needless complexities and obfuscation. But Huntington’s arbitrary bladework served only to obliterate the reality that most conflict is not between civilisations but within them, as the inhabitants of Rwanda, Northern Ireland and countless other tribal cockpits know to their cost. As Edward Said pointed out, the theory made no allowance for ‘the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilisation; or for considering that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture; or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilisation’.

      Each of Huntington’s supposedly monolithic ‘civilisations’, even that of the West, includes different currents – fundamentalism, traditionalism, modernism, liberalism and so on. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma, like the sarin gas attack on Tokyo subway passengers by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, was a spectacular (though mercifully rare) manifestation of the tensions to be found within even modern and democratic cultures. These destructive assaults differ only in scale, not in kind, from the more frequent atrocities perpetrated by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria against fellow-members of their own ‘civilisation’.

      For all its apparent novelty, Huntington’s eye-catching model was largely a reworking of the classical ‘realist’ theories that have long dominated the study of foreign relations, in which international politics is essentially an unending struggle for power between coherent but isolated units, each striving to advance its own interests in an anarchic world. The only difference, as critics pointed out, was that Huntington ‘has replaced the nation-state, the primary playing piece in the old game of realist politics, with a larger counter: the civilisation. But in crucial respects, the game itself goes on as always.’

      Curiously, Samuel Huntington’s conservative pessimism – with its emphasis on cultural predestination, its narrow religiocultural definition of what constitutes a ‘civilisation’, its reluctance to accept the possibility of cross-pollination between cultures – echoed many of the tenets promoted by those self-styled radicals in the West who had marched down the dead-end of ‘identity politics’. Both effectively denied people the freedom to choose their own affiliations and associations, imposing lifelong allegiance to a club which they never applied to join. The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen described the Clash of Civilisations theory as nothing less than ‘a violation of human rights’, which may sound like hyperbole until one recalls that the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the murder of Salman Rushdie because the Londonbased ‘blasphemer’ had Muslim forebears; had The Satanic Verses been written by a white Anglo-Saxon, no fatwa could have been promulgated. Professor Sen cited the bloodshed in Rwanda, Congo, Bosnia and Kosovo – and the rise of violent Hindu chauvinism in his own birthplace, India – as further evidence that the amplification of one distinctive identity ‘can convert one of many co-existing dividing lines into an explosive and confrontational division’.

      The Clash of Civilisations and the End of History were invariably regarded as opposites – often, indeed, the only two alternatives available. ‘These are the two touchstones of any debate about the future direction of the world,’ the Washington Post reported. ‘They’re the theoretical elephants in the room. The old debate about capitalism vs. communism СКАЧАТЬ